EMULATORS & RETRO GAMING

The modern PC is incredibly powerful when considered to machines ca. 1980. Back in 1980 the Radio Shack TRS-80 was expensive and it was not very powerful. It also cost several thousand dollars.

There is an open source C program to emulate CP/M which allows antique BASIC and even binary backwards compatibility.

PC-DOS and MS-DOS were used for over 15 years before DirectX class games began to emerge.

Hyper-V can also run Linux. There is also an emulator for Windows 8.1 phones.included with the professional version Visual Studio 2015.

Over the years there have been many console type gaming platforms. Today however it’s possible to pay most of the old classic Atari 2600 games using a software emulator of the old machine. Emulators have been made for dozens of old machines are available. The main issue with emulators is mostly the various pads and controllers. Windows can map buttons on a USB pad as desired.

The scope of site however is more focused from the IBM PC and onwards. TRS-80 BASIC generally works with PC BASIC however some functions like cassette tape may need to be changed to disk etc.

Many early PC games were written in 8088 Assembler. MASM changed a lot over time which was a big nuisance back in the 1980s. Sometimes it may be easier to rewrite the code in C++.

DOS VIRTUAL MACHINE

Today with Windows 8 and above, Hyper-V has some potential. For example we have successfully resurrected DOS 6.22 with 64MB of extended memory.